The lost gardens of Old Broad Street

The summer is finally over, and not just because of the autumnal fog outside early this  morning; I have just found out that a glorious, tropical rain forest hidden within a City of London office block for the last 30 years is no more. This secret garden – occupying every level of an atrium rising from ground floor to glazed roof – included stepped terracing, a waterfall and dozens of mature plants including bamboo, ficus and palm trees. But now all that has gone, as part of a ‘repositioning’ of Pinners Hall that has stripped its interior and will fill that atrium in. It’s a sad end for what was the last in a sequence of buildings by the Fitzroy Robinson Partnership that originated, innovated and explored the concept of landscaped atriums.

Named after the livery company for pin-makers that once stood on the corner site, the 1993 building presented a narrow front to Old Broad Street just opposite the Nat West Tower but a much longer elevation on Great Winchester Street. Fitzroy’s partner-in-charge Alan Warner designed this speculative block in line with City traditions on the outside, using Classical architectural language, but the contemporary demand for large, unobstructed floorplates inside. At the block’s core was his version of the architectural feature that Fitzroy’s had introduced to Britain more than twenty years before – the atrium.

Invented in post-war America, this big, top-glazed internal space at the heart of a building brought daylight, visual interest and environmental conditioning to a new generation of hotels, shopping malls and offices. It crossed the Atlantic in 1976, when Fitzroy’s built the very first new building in the UK to employ the feature not far from Pinners Hall in Billiter Street.

Through several more projects in the City – amongst many that kept the practice busy throughout the Eighties and Nineties – Fitzroy’s continually pushed the envelope as to what an atrium could be and how it might function for those working in, visiting or even passing through a building. Increasingly lavish planting, using large trees, shrubs and ground cover, plus stone, water and more also characterised these spaces. The series climaxed at Pinners Hall.

Entrance was conventional enough for a building of its time, through a succession of generous spaces clad in pale stone and thus to a narrow lift lobby on the ground floor. Here, however, was a hint of what was to come with a storey-height waterfall tumbling down a rocky wall into a pool. A few more steps and the atrium proper, seven storeys high and pushing deeper into the building with each successive floor, was revealed. A staircase of terraces containing fig trees, lilies and more was created, with spillways in the lowest three tiers forming an asymmetrical cascade that fed the waterfall. A convenient handrail allowed full appreciation of this spectacle while waiting for a lift, with similar balconies on the floors above complemented by glazed walls on the other three sides.

It was a truly spectacular sight, as I found a few years ago when discovering it for the first time a few years ago, the overwhelming impression that of a lush paradise wrapped by a skin of office floors. The attention to detail was impressive and the workmanship superb, such as the spillways carefully cut from Swedish Alberga granite. The rock was artificial, cunningly cast from actual examples and spotted with artificial lichen, but the trees were the real thing, imported – like the atrium they were populating – from the US after nine months of maturing. Several metres tall each, they were positioned using cables strung between four electric winches via anchors embedded high up the walls. Special ceiling lighting encouraged plant growth and there was an automatic irrigation system.

The atrium at Pinners Hall existed purely as a sumptuous visual amenity for those within the building, creating what one Fitzroy’s partner described to me as “the experience of outside, outdoors, and of something that is unique”.  I was researching my piece for the Twentieth Century Society’s forthcoming Journal, and had been visiting each of the Fitzroy’s atrium buildings as well as meeting current and former employees. Seeing Pinners Hall and talking with its facilities manager, who had watched construction and been there ever since, was a fitting high point of this work.

Today, architects Stiff & Trevellion are masterminding a remodelling that includes extra floors and the inevitable greened external terraces, an inversion of Warner’s interiority that will bring the block into line with more recent buildings. True, the massive amount of material stripped out as a result – from a sixteen-tonne generator removed from the roof to ‘a significant quantity of ironmongery’ salvaged from the office floors – is being recycled, whilst the plants have been rehomed. Some were gifted to a community garden at UCL.

It’s increasingly hard to argue with the unique commercial property environment of the Square Mile, but sometimes it’s hard to understand its decisions.